France: anti-capitalists must send Euro-summit packing

The Nice summit of the European Union is another milestone along the road of a federal Europe under the rule of the multinationals.

But it is also another date on the post-Seattle world tour of anti-capitalist resistance. For the European bosses it is Maastricht, Amsterdam, Cologne; for the oppressed and exploited it is Seattle, Washington and Prague.

Now the two forces meet as deadly enemies in Nice. Their job: to take federalism a stage further in the service of corporate profits. Our task: to surround the summit and by direct action prevent them achieving their stated goals:

• to revise article 133 of the Amsterdam Treaty. The launch of the euro unleashed a tidal wave of mergers and rationalisations in finance, commerce and industry. But still Europe lags behind the USA in most industries. The US corporations is federal state and one that enjoys greater power over its working class. At Nice, Europe’s bosses aim to revise article 133 of the Amsterdam Treaty so that the Commission has more power to push through binding ant-working class measures on member states. There is a proposal on the table from the French presidency of the EU which would make the European Commission responsible for setting the levels and terms of unemployment benefits for all member states.
  
• the adoption of a timetable up to 2004 to allow six East European states to join the EU. The aim is clear for the existing members: profit from the new markets while denying the applicant countries the same social rights as the existing ones. In order that the “broader Europe” is not paralysed by national disagreements the EU states will have to surrender more national sovereignty, through qualified majority voting and give more power to the Commission.
  
• the adoption of a proposed Charter of Fundamental Rights as a sop to disguise the fact that the summit will represent a real shift of power away from the workers of Europe. The draft embodies “existing rights only” and does not increase the rights of EU citizens. Some of the rights already established in the weak European Social chapter have not been included in the EU Charter because this has not yet been ratified by a number of member states.

So even the feeble call in the Social chapter for "fair remuneration" is not included. There is no right to a minimum income. Even those included – such as the “right to collective bargaining and industrial action” or the “right to information and consultation” – are rendered useless by the clause that they will have effect only "in accordance with Community law and national laws and practices" .

Britain’s anti-union laws are therefore safe against challenge in European courts and British bosses will continue to trample on rights established in countries like Germany. The conference wants to put in place qualified majority voting on social questions.

Tens of thousands will be in Nice to stop them. Nice is the latest opportunity to turn the anti-capitalist movement towards the working class and make the workers' movement anti-capitalist once again.

As Europe’s bosses try to compete with North America and Asia, the unemployed, the socially excluded, the racially and nationally oppressed will all face attempts to worsen their already intolerable conditions. The increase in the size and strength of the multinational corporations will lead to attacks on workers’ wage levels, health and social welfare provision, on the education of young people and the democratic rights of immigrants and those seeking asylum in Europe.

For the former “Communist” countries of Eastern Europe and the countries of the “third world” it will mean intensified exploitation.

Does this mean that the answer for Europe’s workers is to force “their own” national states to quit the EU as small capitalist states or to fight to break it up? No! Going back to small capitalist and imperialist states is no solution.

Such "independent" states would have to adopt even more savage austerity policies than the EU, even more ruthless downsizing and rationalisation, to compete on the world market with big states like the USA and the mega -corporations.

The only realistic alternative facing the workers, youth and immigrants communities is to seize control of the vast resources and productive forces of the continent which their labour has created. The answer lies not in going back but forward. To do this we have go beyond our nationally divided and bureaucratic labour movements.

A sharp either/or faces us in the coming years. Either an intensification of exploitation and oppression or increasing unity in a militant continent-wide class struggle. Defeat is inevitable if we cling to the old strategy of the Communist Parties or the left-wing of the Social Democratic, Socialist and Labour Parties.

National labour movements which pledge themselves to unity with their own "patriotic bosses" against the EU, which sever their links with their European brothers and sisters, will be politically and organisationally crippled and disarmed.

Nor can we adopt the “pro-European” imperialist stance of Blair, Schroeder, Jospin or D’Alema. Workers must not sacrifice their lives to the dictates of the European Central Bank, to the united stock exchanges of Frankfurt, Paris and the City of London.

We must not side with a new European policy designed to gain a bigger slice of the economies of the “developing countries”. We must not support a European “defence force” which will bomb and terrorise states that resist subordination.

We, the workers of Europe, must overtake and outstrip our bosses’ unification drive. We must build a new Europe wide workers’ movement independent of all fractions of the capitalist class.

This new movement can be an indissoluble link in a even wider, truly global chain. We can do it because we have done it before. In the 1860s, the 1890s and the 1920s, European workers launched powerful international organisations which reached out to workers on all the other continents.

If the globalisation of capital is a threat then the globalisation of labour is the answer to it. The national union federations must be combined into a European trade union movement.

The millions of unorganised workers must be recruited to it. Every workplace must elect its council of elected and recallable delegates. Youth, women, immigrants must likewise organise democratic mass movements to fight for their rights.

Only by concerted action across Europe can the new mega-corporations be prevented from slashing wages and working conditions, weakening or abolishing trade union rights and workplace organisation. Only by Europe-wide action can the EU leaders’ plans to erode social welfare provision be defeated.

Only by common action between the workers of western and Eastern Europe can the bosses be stopped from undercutting wages and social gains in the West and restoring a brutal low wage, dependent capitalism in the east.

Only by practical aid to the workers of Russia and East Europe helping them to establish powerful unions, workplace organisations and political parties, can European workers undercut the plans of the multinationals to repeatedly close and move factories to the locations of highest exploitation and lowest trade union and democratic rights.

But our goal must be more than a treadmill of defensive struggles. It must be a total alternative to capitalism.

On the European continent there exist the accumulated productive forces, the scientific and technological innovations, the human skills that can lay the basis of a planned economy in which working people can end exploitation and the chaos of the market: a Socialist United States of Europe.

The European working class must fight for measures which expose and challenge the failure of a system based on the ownership by the capitalist class; which mobilises and prepares the working class to take over control of the economy and to seize state power in a European socialist revolution.

Such a programme of measures must start from the major needs and struggles facing workers today. It must unite workers right across the continent in a common struggle and orient them both towards the expropriation of the wealth of the billionaire parasites and the multinational corporations and to the destruction of the apparatus of repression which guards their plunder.

• Millions of unemployed in Europe want to work in socially useful employment. Drastically cut the long hours, the unhealthy and stressful condition of the employed workforce. Divide the work available between all those able to do it.

• A maximum 35 hour working week now, right across Europe, but without any loss of pay, speed ups or flexibilisation. If employers respond by threatened closure or redundancies they must be nationalised with no compensation and workers’ control instituted as step towards and a training ground for a democratically planned economy.

• For a guaranteed European minimum wage of 10 euros an hour. For a minimum income for the unemployed and pensioners set at 2/3 of the average wage. Equal pay for all workers, irrespective of gender, nationality and age. Full pay for trainees and apprentices from the first day of work.

• Against insecure employment. . Full contracts with protection against dismissal from day one. All waged workers in Europe must have the same legal rights: protection against redundancies, paid holidays, 100% pay on sickness leave, maternity rights, pension rights. Across Europe, these rights have to be levelled up to the highest standard. Recognition of all qualifications across Europe.

• No to privatisation. No to public-private joint ventures. Tax private wealth to fund public services; no to all contracting out within the public services, transport, healthcare or education. For the renationalisation of all companies or services privatised over the last two decades, without compensation and under workers and service users’ control. The EU must be stopped from signing treaties with the WTO to lower labour conditions or that opens up health and education to privatisation!

• For a European wide plan under workers’ control to improve public transport, social services, health services, education, cultural facilities and to counter environmental degradation. Such a programme must be paid for out of taxation and confiscation of the bosses profits and implemented under workers’ control.

• Tax the rich. Abolish all indirect taxation – notably sales taxes. Replace it by taxes on profits and unearned wealth and a steeply progressive income tax. Workers control in businesses, banks, and the abolition of commercial secrecy will prevent all tax evasion or the shifting of money to tax havens. Confiscation of the entire fortunes of all those who attempt it.

• Defend the public health social services systems against cuts and privatisation. For workers and users’ control. For workers management of all pension funds – private and public. For a guaranteed income in retirement at the average working salary . Generalise the highest and best quality welfare services already won in certain states, right across Europe. For a secure and pleasurable retirement for all. Workers’ control of the social security and pension funds.

• For the right of all to further and higher education. A living grant for all school and college students over 16, so that they are not forced to work part time as cheap labour. School and college students must have the right to study in any country of the European Union. Full civic, economic and social rights for youth. The right to vote at the age of sixteen. Abolition of all legal penalties against consensual sexual relations between young people. For state and community funded entertainment and sporting facilities under the control of the users.

Young people must not be a reserve of unemployed or poorly paid and unorganised labour used by the employers to undermine the gains of adult workers. Full wage rates, holiday entitlement and union rights for young workers. Down with job insecurity and imposed casual or flexible working. Abolish all compulsory, temporary and low paid work schemes! For minimum wages or benefits to be paid at the average adult level.

• For 24 hour childcare paid for by the state and the bosses. For women’s control over their own bodies: free abortion and contraception on demand. A minimum twelve months fully paid maternity/paternity leave. Full employment rights and equal rates of pay for part time workers. Make equal pay for equal work a reality! For an end to police and judicial tolerance of violence against women in and out of the home. Fund an expansion of women and children’s refuges.

• Lesbians and gay men are still subject to legal persecution, police harassment and employers’ discrimination in most European states. We demand an end to discrimination and full legal equality, including the right to a legal status for couples equal to civil marriage, rights to custody of children, equal rights to shared housing and equal terms for life insurance.

• Against all restrictions on movement in Europe. For open borders. Repeal the Shengen and Trevi agreements and the British immigration laws! Against all immigration controls. No restrictions of the right to work or to stay. Immediate entitlement for immigrants to full state benefits and social housing, No restrictions to their social rights and political activity. For immediate full national and European citizenship rights for all sans papiers, including the right to vote in all elections. For unrestricted the right of political asylum.

• Against racist violence and discrimination. For the right of self-defence against police attacks, and against the violence of the far right and fascists. Smash the NPD. Mobilise the workers movement to crush all fascists. Fight racist parties the Vlaams Bloc, the Front National, the MSI, the Freiheitliche Partei. Drive all fascists and active racists out of the trade union movement

• No to the Common Agricultural Policy – a conspiracy to support the large and medium-sized farmer base of the conservative parties at the expensive of the working and lower middle class taxpayers. No subsidies for the agrarian capitalists and agribusinesses. Expropriate the banks, cancel the debts and mortgages of the working farmers and provide them with cheap credit, for investment into modern machinery and to aid the formation of small farmers co-operatives. The average industrial wages and social and trade union rights for all agricultural workers.

• No special tax support or fuel price support for the haulage companies in the EU. For a uniform system of road taxes and licences in the EU. For a massive EU investment programme in rail freight.

• European agriculture needs to be completely reorganised and planned in the interests of the direct producers, small farmers, agricultural workers and consumers. The natural environment must be preserved and restored where it has been devastated by industrial and agricultural pollution.

There must be no introduction into agriculture and the wider ecosystem of genetically modified organisms until exhaustive scientific tests – independent both of the capitalist governments and the food industry – and secure trials have been carried out. The people alone – once they have been fully informed – must make a democratic decision whether to do so. For the expropriation without compensation of all the big farms and agribusinesses, the landed estates, the food processing and GM food corporations, and the supermarket chains.

• Workers should fight for the Europe-wide planned closure of nuclear power stations as part of a shift away from the reliance on nuclear energy. Close Temelin in the Czech republic which is not yet fully functioning. For cheap electricity from EU to applicant states who cut down their dependency on nuclear plants. The workers employed in the nuclear industry should be reallocated to research into nuclear fusion or transferred to other socially useful work without loss of pay or worsening of conditions.

Fossil fuel burning power stations must drastically reduce their emissions of greenhouse gasses and other pollutants. For a planned shift away from the burning of fossil fuels towards sustainable energy production, including solar, wave, wind power must be undertaken. No to the privatisation of energy production and the water industry – for their re-nationalisation under workers' control with no compensation to the privatisers. Open the books and records of all energy companies to inspection by workers and local communities – for a right of popular veto over all health-threatening production methods.

• No to NATO and the European Defence Union! Not a penny not a person for the defence of the EU. Spend the billions spent on defence of the bosses’ system on abolishing unemployment and poverty. Dissolve the armies, police, the secret services, replacing them with the armed people. KFOR out of the Balkans! For immediate and unconditional economic aid to Serbia from the EU. Lift all EU trade and diplomatic sanctions against Iraq.

• No to all anti-union laws, to any restrictions of the right to strike, to take action as soon as the workers have decided, to take solidarity action. to join a trade union,. Occupations and strikes to defeat lockouts, redundancies, closures and privatisation. The excellent example of the Cellatex -Givet workers occupation in France this summer showed the way! For militant solidarity action in support of other workers and the unemployed. Establish and use the right to take political and general strike action in all the states of the EU and across it.

• The rank and file must control working class struggles. For mass assemblies and accountable committees of struggle, who are elected and recallable by the rank and file. Action committees of the employed and unemployed workers.

• For a Europe wide movement of the unemployed. All unemployed must have the right to join unions.

• For Europe wide industrial unions, starting in the multinational corporations, and a campaign to level up wages and rights to the highest level across Europe and reduce working hours. For rank and file workers control over their own unions. Break the power of the bureaucracy – all officials to be subject to recall and to be paid the average wage of their members.

• Build active solidarity between the workers movement in Western and Eastern Europe! For common union organisation, collective bargaining and struggles inside multinational enterprises like VW, Siemens or Bank Austria! Long live international workers solidarity - The Western European workers movement should materially assist their brothers and sisters in the new Eastern European workers’ movement!

• Turn the European works councils from instruments of class collaboration to democratic councils of recallable delegates, organs of class struggle and workers’ control. Abolish all existing legal obligations on works council representatives to observe business secrecy. For their right to organise industrial action. Build links between the rank and file of multi-national companies. For cross-plant and international committees of workers in multi-national companies.

• An end to business secrecy and bureaucratic secrecy – open the accounts and the computer records of the banks, the businesses, the state and EU bureaucrats to inspection by the workforce and the public.

• The expropriation of the large banks, industries, communications systems and the media, large farms and retail outlets. For their operation according to a system of integrated plans at a European, national, regional and local level. All to be democratically decided on by workers and consumers and with workers management of production and distribution.

• Solidarity with the countries exploited by the European banks and multinationals. Down with the Lome Conventions that condemn “third world” countries to economic slavery. No to military intervention, whether by Nato or the CSCE, to prop up the military alliances or exploitation by the European mining and oil companies and agribusinesses. For the complete and unconditional cancellation of these countries’ debts to the European banks and states.

• Down with all barriers, or pre-conditions on the peoples of eastern and south eastern Europe wishing to enter the European Union. The immediate and full application of all democratic and social rights existing in the EU to these states.

• Down with the unelected European Commission, European Central Bank, European Court of Justice. Down with the monarchies of the EU, the executive presidencies, the Senates, second chambers and federal councils which thwart the democratic will.

• For an end to national persecution and for the right of self-determination of oppressed peoples in Europe! For the right of all minorities to use their own language! End the persecution of Roma! For the release of all Basque separatist prisoners in Spain. For the abolition of the sectarian RUC in Northern Ireland an end to the discrimination against Catholics. All British troops out now. For the right of the Kosovars and Chechens to independent states. No to the persecution of the Serb minority in Kosova! No to the discrimination against Russians in the Baltic states!

• For the election of a sovereign European Constituent Assembly by all those over the age of 16, permanently resident in the EU and from those countries who wish to join it. Down with the treaties from Rome to Maastricht that enshrine the rule of capital. Should such an Assembly – under the revolutionary pressure of the masses – take measures against big capital the working class must mobilise all its forces to break the sabotage and resistance of big capital and its state forces.

• But no parliament can take effective measures to expropriate the exploiters or destroy the machinery of oppression which defends them – the armies, police and secret security forces. Only a revolution can create the rule of the European working class – through organisations based on delegates directly elected from the workplaces and the communities and defended by an armed population. The state form of working class power in Europe must be based on workers councils. It must be:

• The Socialist United States of Europe – fighting for WORLD REVOLUTION!

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